Children of the Party

Clara Allison is at a New York art-world dinner party. Le Tessier's 200 guests include artists, critics, and mysterious well-dressed men with gray hair. Policemen stand around. The food is ludicrous: seafood sausage, black pasta. Wayne Rydell, the new celebrity artist, makes butter sculptures of forgotten cartoon characters from sixties television. Benedict Bunny, the creation that made his name, is on display in the host's living room. Wayne's girlfriend, a Playboy bunny, is his new subject. He turns to Clara and asks, "Can you ever remember a game of Monopoly that actually ended?" The question, oddly sincere, jogs Clara's memory of Monopoly with her mother and sister, in Canada where dinner parties are civilized. David, Clara's husband, begins to explain the origins of Monopoly, partly embellished. David has been working on a "Random Walk" show at the Whitney. Basil Constantine achieved notoriety by attaching cadaver parts to his canvases. Sam Gertler talks about the cave of Lescure. Le Tessier asks Clara if she has seen Wayne's show. Her invariably pleasing response is, "Oh, the light!" Isaac Isselman says, "Why did we give up Beauty Per Se for Ugly with an Explanation?" David is describing his pet theory: "The economy of signs has become as efficient as the economy of stocks, and this means that meaning has become a random walk." Someone arrives, creating a commotion. Clara gets up to try to find out who it is. She talks to Isaac, who is seated next to another Isaac Isselman, a millionaire. Clara follows a white-haired woman, but loses her. She walks by the lap pool, where a woman has been hired to swim among the floating red candles. From the bathroom, Clara hears a shower of sparks and a cry, and smells burning. Wayne's butter bunny, in its little glass booth, has begun to steam. The swimmer tells Clara that someone tripped on the plug and it shorted. She says, "It's just a favor for the party, isn't it?" Clara races upstairs to find one of the policemen. David is holding forth to some of the unknown gray men. Isaac Isselman launches into a lengthy monologue about what city New York feels like (his conclusion: Naples, 1787). Clara talks to a gray man about the bunny; he misunderstands but reveals that the unknown men are famous billionaires. Clara is alarmed; she wants to rescue David. She runs into Vladimir Malenkov, the Russian painter, and asks him what the party is for. He says, "triumph of avant-garde conceptual capitalism..." His fantasy of revolution is throwing billionaires off the roof of Tiffany's. Vladimir prompts her to sing the "Marseillaise"; he sings along in English, mistranslating "patrie" as "party." He says, "We are children of the old Party. You, I think, are a child of this party." He thinks David is an art-world lackey. Clara runs into Le Tessier. He explains that his secret is to "play checkers while the world plays chess." A dark woman says that once people might have protested this party, but now there are no groups, "only ones." The man being toasted got out of prison this morning. He committed some white-collar crime. The second guest, who is to go in tonight, is led off, waving, by one of the policemen. David has been left behind by the billionaires, "an incident on a random walk." The melting bunny has been discovered, but it turns out the butter is only molded, and Wayne can easily turn out more. Clara cries, "I want to go home!" and yanks at the tablecloth, toppling a few glasses. She and David get into a cab, but get out when Clara becomes ill. They go into a cash-machine booth and Clara throws up. David remembers they were here before to get the cash for his wedding suit. "For the moment they were safe inside the glass room, and because she was, by nature, so stubborn she still believed they might be happy forever."

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